each week at this time "american history tv" features an hourlong conversation from a c-span's a sunday night interview series "q and a," here's this week's encore "q and a" on "american history tv." >> this week on "q and a," our guest is howard university history professor edna greene-medford. her specialty is 19th century african-american history. >> professor edna

greene-medford, the year 2008 and brac rarack obama running f president, where do you think all this will end up in history of african-americans? >> it's an important period that we're living in certainly, you know, we don't know what's going to happen with the election, but what we do know is that this is historic, not just because there's an african-american running but because there's a woman running as well. but for african-americans it's especially important because it gives us hope, i think, that there will be full inclusion in american life. whether obama wins or not, i think, many people will be pleased that he did so well. they would be even more pleased if he'd won, of course, but, you know, i look at what's happening in terms of my students getting interested in the whole campaign, and i've seen them energized in a way that i have never seen before. i've seen relatives who may not have been particularly interested in politics now very

interested, and so i think it's been very important for african-americans, not just because he's running for president, but because he has done well other than run for president before him, of course, but he really has done quite well. and i think what we want is to see that he has the opportunity to run. >> i don't know where you are politically on this, and you don't have to tell us, but have you been involved in any campaign? >> i have not yet. in the past i think i've been willing to sit on the sidelines and let other people do the legwork, and i think that i'm about to change that. it has energized me as well, and i think at some point i will get very actively involved. but i am waiting to see who the nominees are going to be. the republican nominee, identify think it's pretty obvious we know, but in terms of the

democratic nominee, we're just not certain yet. and i'm waiting to see what happens there, and i do expect to be very involved in the national election. >> we got to know you during lincoln douglas back in 1994 at this network, invited you to come do this program for a couple reasons, one, to talk about this world we're living in today and also next year is the 200th anniversary of abraham lincoln's birthday. we'll get to that. but go back to the feeling you have in your students and in your relatives and all that. can you explain more of when that started happening? did it happen before iowa or after iowa? >> i think it happened before iowa. with my students i think it was always there, but i think that since iowa and since some of the other wins that obama has had, people have really begun to believe that their hope could be realized, you know, that he might actually have a chance, and so they've been willing to

sort of -- they've been willing to dream, and i think before this time that hasn't been the case. the assumption was no matter how much you might want it, no matter how much you might be acceptable to the society at large, you wouldn't really have a chance of becoming president if you were african-american, and i think people are beginning to think that, well, again, maybe this could happen. and if it doesn't, i think there's been a great -- it's been a great opportunity to show america what is possible. >> what's the difference between barack obama and jesse jackson and shirley chisholm back in '72, i think? >> i'm not so sure that there's that much of a difference in the candidates. i mean, certainly the candidates were very different. but i think what's happening now is america is willing to think beyond race. at least we're hoping that that's the case. that's what i see. i'm especially pleased with what i see as young white americans

who are willing to come to obama's aid, to support him, believing that he's the person who is -- who at least has potential to be president and who certainly deservels the right to run. i mean, more than anything else, that shows us that we have made progress. and when shirley chisholm ran and when jesse jackson ran, i just don't think we were quite there. we may actually be there now. whether he wins or not, he's doing really well among segments of the population that we might not have expected, and certainly was not there in the past in terms of supporting a black candidate. so, i think we have made some progress. >> i heard a black friend say barack obama's white. it's the white people who think he's black. >> uh-huh, uh-huh. well, from my perspective i think barack obama is a man who

can have a foot in both worlds and understand both, and perhaps we need someone like that, certainly to run as a candidate. i'm certainly not going to suggest to people who they should vote for, but in terms of whether or not he's black enough or whether he's black or whether he's white, i think he has had the kind of experience that makes it possible for him to identify with all types of people, and i think it makes it possible for all types of people to identify with him. and that's a good thing, because we are very multiethnic i country. we have varied backgrounds, and i think of the consequence of that, it's good for the country if we can have a candidate who can appeal to all of those various segments of the population. >> how long have you taught at howard university? >> this is my 21st year. i -- >> what do you teach? >> -- believe it's been that long. >> what are you teaching?

>> i am teaching this year jacksonian american and i teach a colloquium, and i teach african-american history but on occasion colonial america as well. >> i picked this up at one of our cable television trade magazines this morning, date line washington, d.c., black television news channel announces last tuesday it has reached a multiyear carriage agreement with comcast for distribution in several of the operator's urban-based systems beginning in 2009. the network created by former u.s. congressman j.c. watts will launch in 2009 and will provide original news programming with a distinctively african-american perspective according to a network press release. why do we need black television news? >> because the mainstream media, they just don't always cover african-americans in a way that

we need to be covered. we're more than just the latest crime statistic. we're more than just the latest statistic on poverty. there's so much more going on in the african-american community, and i would hope that a network that's devoted to african-american issues will be able to show that. >> good or bad for the society that we're all ending up in our little worlds? >> i'm hoping that ultimately we won't be in our little worlds, that once we've had the opportunity to show what we are about, then we can all come together. but i think that, first of all, we need to educate each other, and until we do that, you know, the media's not going to give african-americans the broader attention that we deserve or any other minority group for that matter. i think it's about misunderstanding, it's about lack of knowing who we are. so, once we taught each other who we are, then perhaps we can

come together as a nation, but right now we're still doing that, and that's why, you know, i think the obama campaign has been very important in sort of keeping that dialogue going about the fact that we're all americans and we are very similar. we're more similar than we are different. i really do think that. but until we're able to show that, there's going to be this misconception about who african-americans or who minorities are in general. i think a news program or a news network devoted to african-americans might help to do that. >> where did you grow up? >> i grew up in charles city county, virginia, on the james river, about 25 miles southeast of richmond. >> what was your childhood like, your parents, what did they do? was the community, was it integrated? >> no, the county was 82% african-american when i was growing up. totally segregated.

i went to a segregated school. in fact, my school did not integrate until the year after i graduated, and i don't like telling my age, but this is important, so i graduated in 1969, so the school system integrated in 1970, at least fully integrated. there were a few african-american students going to the local white high school before i graduated, but there was not a single white child in my school, and there was one white teacher and she was in the library. so, it was a totally segregated environment, well, for the most part. the officeholders were primarily white, although there was one black member of the board of supervisors, but for a county that's 82% black, one would have expected that there would have been greater political voice than we actually had. >> why wasn't it? >> i don't know. i think it may be that people

became accustomed to playing a certain role. there were always people in the county who did fight for civil rights. i grew up knowing, you know, about what they were doing, and they were always in the forefront, insisting that their children go to the white school and that kind of thing. but generally it took some time, you know, for us to get the kind of rights, the level of influence in the county that we -- one would have expected from the proportion of african-americans in the population. >> you go back today, what do you see in the county? >> many more african-american officeholders. what i find interesting about the county is that it is fully integrated now. and there is a kind of camaraderie between the various groups. we had a three-tiered system in the county. there was an african-american component, of course, the largest component, the white component, and native americans.

and the school systems were all separate for a long time. and so what i see now is everyone's in the same system. they're working together for the betterment of the county. it's really improved tremendously. >> undergraduate from hampton institute, now hampton university. >> yes. >> historically black college. did you get a masters from university of illinois? >> yes. >> in what? >> u.s. history. >> and you got your ph.d. from maryland in what? >> u.s. history, with an emphasis on aftrican-american history in the period from the civil war to 1900. >> so, what were your parents doing back then in those days? >> my father was a janitor at philipmorris, the tobacco company. he had worked at the stemry for a few years and then had gotten a position as a janitor at the research center and my mother was a housewife, stay-at-home

mom. and we grew up in an environment with two very loving parents, two very stern parents, who kept us on the straight and narrow and made us realize that the ny time in to success was my life that i didn't expect to go to college. the big problem was how we were going to pay for it, but there was never any discussion about whether or not i would go. it was clear that i would go. >> hampton institute is a historically black college, one of the 110 that exist and now you teach at howard university. in the middle you had integrated schools. predominantly white. what's the difference of the two worlds? >> i think at hampton i had the kind of nurturing that i didn't get at the other two institutions, and it might be an

unfair assessment because the other two institutions were graduate institutions and we know that the graduate program isn't quite like the undergraduate program. i mean, you're an adult by the time you're in graduate school and you're expected to do certain things on your own. in an undergraduate environment there's a lot more nurturing, i think. i had african-american teachers who thought of me as their child almost, you know, as you are going to do well because we need you to do well. and so there is no time for fun and games. you're here because you're trying to undertake a serious thing. in the other institutions, it was, you know, you came here, you should do well, do it, you know. and so i think at howard as welwell wr well, there's a great deal of nurturing of students. some of our students from first generation just as i was going

to hampton. my family hadn't gone to college. i had a cousin who had gone to hampton before me, but for the most part i was the first generation and especially on my mother's side of the family. and so i did need some nurturing and i received that at hampton. and at howard i hope that i do the same thing, not just for students who are first generation, but for other students as well who need a little bit of one-on-one, and it's not always about academics. it's about the personal piece as well. some people are away from home for the first time. they need someone to come and sit down and talk to. just someone to connect with. and i think that that's what hbcu do for african-american students that might not be the case in other places. >> what's the population at howard? >> we have about 11,000 students and at least 5,000 of those are graduate students and professional students. >> how many black and white? >> i'm not sure of the

statistics, but we do have white students there. we have students from all over the world at howard, so although it's an hsbcu, it's a very diverse place, especially in the professional fields and the graduate schools. the undergraduate component is not quite as diverse, but it's getting so. getting more hispanic students and so forth, so it's wonderful. >> howard is not very far from where we're sitting right here. but that's basically a world of african-americans at howard. or more than the population at large, let's say. >> that's true. >> here's the point i want to make, if you go to the lincoln forum run by frank williams and william holzer, you may be the only black person in the world? >> yes, until recently. until fairly recently, yes, it was not unusual for me to be one of maybe four or five african-americans and quite often the only african-american

woman. and people never quite understood -- my colleagues, i think, were from time to time had wondered about why i bothered to attend those kind of programs. because i think people generally don't see the lincoln forum and lincoln programs as relevant to african-americans. and i think that's unfortunate, because lincoln and the war were very relevant to us. >> we have some video from others who talk about this, one a black man, and one a white man, and actually both of them are not big fans of abraham lincoln, i think it's safe to assume. first up from an interview in 2000 from lerone bennett who used to run "ebony" magazine who wrote a book about abraham lincoln called "forced into glory, abraham lincoln versus the white dream." this is about a minute and a half. i want you to listen, please, to what he had to say and then give us your perspective. >> okay. >> all over the country now

people are engaged in packaging information on lincoln, putting together exhibits on lincoln, doing this and doing that about lincoln. it's a whole industry that employs hundreds of people, probably thousands of people. and it's important from that way, he's also a religion, and as i indicate in that same chapter, in "the new york times" before this book was published, that lincoln is such a god that the ordinary rules of evidence don't apply to him. and also the third point i think is important. he is one of the keys to america, americans see themselves in lincoln, american politicians tend to measure themselves by lincoln.

he is a secular saint. and i know that, and i know and i said that what i'm proposing here that we look at lincoln is painful, painful to whites and to blacks, but i think it's necessary for the health of this country and to what we've got to do about completing the task we started in this civil war but never finished. >> first of all, what do you think of mr. lerone bennett? >> a wonderful scholar who has written some very important works, who has -- a great researcher as well. i think he's right that we have elevated lincoln to godlike status. i think w.b. dubois perhaps said it best in the 1920s when he said that we have a tendency to make icons of ordinary men and

that, you know, once they're dead, we have to elevate them to this godlike status, and as a consequence what we get is someone who's cold and dead. we don't really get a person. and i think he's right about that. the problem with the way lincoln is treated in the literature, in historical writings, is that he is flawless, he can do no wrong, he emancipated the slaves by himself. and i think when you do that, we do a disservice to a great man. he was very complex. he was very much a 19th century man, but very much unlike 19th century men as well. and i think we do better for him and for the nation and for an understanding of the civil war if we view him in all of his complexity. and i think we're not willing as

a nation to do that because he does embody what we believe is america, and we think that america is flawless. and no one, no nation, is. and so if we look at him for everything that happened, i think what we see is a very remarkable person, and i think we see someone who is much more powerful than we give him credit for when we say he's a saint. and everything was done correctly. >> barack obama made his announcement to run for president standing outside the old statehouse in springfield, illinois, right across the street was lincoln's office. was that the proper symbolism do you think? >> well, symbolism is very powerful, and he understood that americans love lincoln. and if you can hitch your wagon to lincoln, you're on your way. >> do blacks love lincoln? >> oh, i think absolutely, in certain segments of the

community, there are still people who think of lincoln as a great man. i mean, i can't imagine many people who don't think of him as a great man. how can you discount what he did? he saved the union. he did issue the emancipation proclamation that did call for the freeing of almost, but at least 3 million enslaved people, and, yes, the union army did have to come and liberate them before they'd have their freedom or some ran away. but he did issue the emancipation proclamation, and that's important. >> let's listen to lerone bennett talk about the emancipation proclamation and get your take, because you've written a book about this. >> not only did it not free anybody, it slaved or reenslaved more slaves than it freed. because lincoln said in the document, he said he was specifically excludeing certain slaves in southern louisiana and eastern virginia and elsewhere.

these are the two main categories. now, why did he exclude these saves in louisiana? because they were the only slaves he could have freed on january the 1st, 1863. the union controlled southern louisiana and new orleans. the union controlled eastern virginia. now, on january the 1st, he could have freed these slaves. all he could do was just not specifically exclude them. instead of freeing them, abraham lincoln unfortunately on january the 1st said i'm not talking about you. this document, you are the same as you were as though this document never existed. so, we have about 100,000 slaves in southern illinois -- southern louisiana, sorry about that, and 80,000 or so in eastern virginia, having some 275,000 slaves in tennessee who were not touched by. all across the south i give an estimate of approximately 55,000

slaves that were kept in slavery by the emancipation proclamation. >> your take. >> lincoln had constitutional constraints in issuing the proclamation. he couldn't touch enslaved people in those areas that were under union control because the constitution did not give the president the opportunity to do that. the constitution through the war powers clause gave the president the authority to do whatever he needed to do in order to quell a rebellion, and so

we don't even have to look at what lincoln is saying or his supporters, but african-american contemporaries, understanding that there would still be about 800,000 still enslaved appreciated the fact that the proclamation did call for the freeing of those 3 million and understood, in frederick douglass' words, once you had said people are free in the other parts of virginia, then all of the enslaved people in the border states, in maryland, in kentucky, in missouri, in delaware would get their freedom as well eventually. and, of course, that does happen with the 13th amendment, and lincoln did support that amendment. it would have been wonderful if all enslaved people had been freed by the 13th amendment, but constitutionally it was not possible to do that. >> thomas dilorenzo has been

writing books not all that favorable of abraham lincoln. he's an economist by trade. listen to his take on the emancipation proclamation. >> the 13th amendment freed the slaves to be sure, and lincoln late in his term did support the 13th amendment. you know, so when the states ratify the 13th amendment, that's what freed the slaves. during the war a lot of slaves free themselves as two huge armies went through and created anarchy and chaos. a lot of them freed themselves, and, of course, the emancipation proclamation, who anyone can read online or offline, specifically exempted all the areas of the united states that were under the control of the union at the time. it was even so specific as to mention each parish in louisiana where the union army was in charge at the time of the emancipation proclamation, and so it didn't apply to what was called rebel territory. and so it literally didn't have the ability to free anybody, and

besides that, the president at the time didn't have the ability to end slavery. that would have had to have been a constitutional amendment, which is what happened eventually. but that's one of the great myths of american history, i think. >> put professor dilorenzo into context? >> he's right, the emancipation did not end slavery, but it did call for the freeing of various enslaved people in the areas still under confederate control. he is right that a number of african-americans, a great number of african-americans freed themselves long before the emancipation proclamation was issued by going to the union lines, yes, the emancipation proclamation is not the first effort to make black people free. the first consultation act helps with that, the second consultation act helps with that

as well. but what the emancipation proclamation does is give african-americans hope, because when they hear about it, they understand that the most powerful man in the nation has now sided with them. they already thought of this war as one for their liberation, and now you have lincoln issuing the proclamation, and they're seeing this as the most powerful man in the country is now on our side. if we can make it to the union lines now, we truly will have our freedom. because before that, even though they made it to the union line, they couldn't be certain how they were going to be treated, and, in fact, some of them did leave and came back home. it was an interesting backward and forward movement, you know, across the confederate lines, across the lines of war. and so it is an important step toward the ending of slavery, absolutely the 13th amendment forever ends slavery in this country, but the emancipation proclamation is important. >> abraham lincoln's 200th

birthday is next february. if barack obama were to be elected president, and if abraham lincoln were back after 200 years, what do you think his reaction would be? because there's -- i'm going to show you some other clips. there's a lot of differing opinions about what he thought of blacks. >> well, certainly before his assassination, on more than one occasion, he had indicated that he wouldn't have a problem with seeing the more intelligent black get the right to vote, and those who were veterans, those who had supported the union during the war. he was not for universal suffrage, however. he may have gotten to that point, but we know that lincoln did everything very cautiously. and so the fact that he was even willing to suggest that perhaps the soldiers and the more intelligent should have the right to vote was a step in the right diio